Meet the man behind the world's coolest new festival

Tao Ruspoli is an Italian-American aristrocrat and filmmaker who's lived in a castello in Lazio and a motorhome on Venice Beach. He's also big on polyamory, psychedelics and the power of his centuries-old lineage. He talks to David Jenkins about his heroically philandering father and his hyper-anarchic new festival...

14 Nov 2016

Monday 14 November 2016

Tao Ruspoli once showed a friend his family tree. It's an intriguing one, starting with Marius Scotus, a Scots-born mercenary who saved Pope Leo III when he was attacked and kidnapped back in 799AD. But it was to the 16th-century name of Giacinta Marescotti that Tao drew his pal's attention. 'And I said, "My great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great- aunt was a saint." And instead of being impressed, as I'd expected, he just said, "My! How you've fallen.'"

Hardly. Or sort of. Because 41-year-old Tao is many things: an Italian prince who was, effectively, rendered homeless by a fraudster (fake Légers, dodgy Boteros) his mother married in Los Angeles; who lived for two years on a parking lot in Venice Beach, California, in a school bus he bought on eBay - a school bus he was inhabiting when he wooed and wed Olivia Wilde, then a just-about-to-be film star - without a kitchen or shower but packed with up-to-the-minute film equipment ('The essentials I can do without, it's the luxuries I need,' says a smiling Tao, paraphrasing Oscar Wilde); a filmmaker who's preparing to remake the Marianne Faithfull classic, The Girl on a Motorcycle, for Ed Pressman, producer of Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps and American Psycho.

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There's more: he's the owner of the most popular Airbnb in Venice Beach, the area he lives in most of the year; a dazzling, and recorded, flamenco guitarist; and the moving spirit behind the first Bombay Beach Biennale, a 'Dadaist, surreal, absurdist' festival held below sea level in southern California last April and bidding fair to usurp the passé behemoth that is Burning Man (Bella Freud, a good friend of Tao's and a former lover of his father's, designed the poster).

He'a also, the day after we meet at the family castello in Vignanello, an hour north of Rome, off to have lunch with the Italian film director Bernardo Bertolucci. 'Tao keeps the camera in his hand with curiosity and grace,' says the great man. 'He also knows how to search inside the people he loves - where he knows there are secrets - for his movie and himself.'

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Tao has spent most summers at Castello Ruspoli since his mother, the ceramicist and interior designer Debra Berger, split from his father, Alessandro 'Dado' Ruspoli, 9th Prince of Cerveteri, when Tao was eight (the couple never married: Berger was 18 and Dado was 50 when Tao was born, in Bangkok) and took him off to Los Angeles. This is where Tao thinks and writes and contemplates the 'double life' he leads, as the very modern Californian with 'the blank canvas' that is LA to work on and as the semi-exiled Italian grandee who finds his ancestry a thing of 'astonishment and appreciation', but also a thing he's relieved not to be defined by.

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Though he is, up to a point. For Dado was - and still is - a name to conjure with. Born to great wealth, he once said that to be called decadent 'is a big compliment to me. I think culture comes from decadence; civilisation needs decadence.' Dado lived up to his credo: an opium addict for 45 years, he was a good friend of Dalí, Cocteau, Bardot, Picasso, le tout Europe - Fellini was said to have based elements of La Dolce Vita on him. He married three times and had innumerable affairs and five children, the last at 73. 'Tao,' he said, when his son asked him about this late fecundity, 'allow me to live my youth.' He was spendthrift: so spendthrift that, says Tao, he sold 'everything - 1,000 years of family patrimony', Castello Ruspoli included. (Thankfully, Dado's younger brother bought it and has kept it in the family.)

Tao tells me that a friend once asked him: 'Was your father a Marxist? Because he obviously believed in the redistribution of wealth enough to make it a personal thing.' Tao gives an almost admiring laugh: 'To have divested himself of so much wealth in such a deliberate fashion... I mean, it's difficult to do that, right? It's almost like you have to be on a mission. But I just don't feel entitled to be angry with him; it was his money and his situation. I think my father had a deep intuition - and this is going to sound rose-coloured - that he didn't deserve all this.'

Tao is sipping a cappuccino as we breakfast at a café on Vignanello's Piazza della Repubblica, opposite the small palazzo in which Handel lived when he was court musician to the Ruspolis. He talks fast and circuitously, emanating a crackling enthusiasm for ideas and concepts, metaphysics and modernity, politics and the anthropology of jokes; he went to UC Berkeley and says a course on existentialism, film and literature changed his life. He's wearing a grey T-shirt, well-worn Birkenstocks and a very elegant pair of chalk-striped suit trousers from Davide Cenci, the celebrated Roman tailor - a very Tao amalgam of the Californian and the European. Beside him is the weighty Sony camera that he always has to hand, ready to add to the 980,000 photographs he has taken since he 'started shooting digital in 2001' - he can, he says, look back and see what he's been doing every day these past 15 years. He's an excellent photographer and his entrancing Instagram feed is, among other things, a hymn to female beauty: 'I guess I just inherited from my father a love...' - he pauses - '...a celebration of sexuality and a thirst for these kinds of experiences.'

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He's also inherited, he says, 'an almost pathological optimism' from both his parents. And a sense of adventure: 'I'm always dabbling in rebellion and excess.' The excess is something 'taught by both my parents. They were [are, in his mother's case] very thirsty for life, and [insistent] that one should try as many things as possible. And fortunately I've been grounded enough not to say no to any experience. And luckily I never felt any loss of control. So I've been able to do things like Bombay Beach and experiment in different kinds of relationships and in psychedelics - but carefully, and with an intellectual curiosity.' He has, however, drawn a very firm line at opiates: not only Dado but also Tao's mother and his younger brother Bartolomeo were, or have been, addicts. Tao made an engrossing film, Just Say Know, about his family's addictions - Dado is charm itself about the rituals and ceremonial of opium - and Fix, Tao's only feature film thus far, is partly based on his brother's experiences. As for psychedelics, he's produced one non-fiction film about Timothy Leary and has another, a quasi-biopic, of the great advocate of LSD in the works.

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Tao got a taste of Timothy Leary courtesy of one of his partners in Bombay Beach, Stefan Ashkenazy, owner of West Hollywood's chic Petit Ermitage hotel. Ashkenazy, he recalls delightedly, gave a black-tie dinner on the fifth night of Burning Man, 'the night most people are reduced to eating cold food out of cans. And he had whole roasted pigs and midgets carrying silver salvers laden with magic mushrooms, and Susan Sarandon brought some of Timothy Leary's ashes, which she sprinkled in everyone's drinks. It was the ultimate decadence.' And when Tao asked Ashkenazy if he could put these details in a piece he was writing, Stefan happily agreed and said: 'Tell them that next year I'll have lactating Slavic models serving White Russians made with their breast milk.' No wonder Tao thought Stefan had the right stuff for the Bombay Beach Biennale.

Tao Ruspoli

For Bombay Beach is a byword for the bizarre. It's a rundown resort town by the Salton Sea, the largest body of water in California, 30-odd miles from Coachella and some 225 feet below sea level. It was once chic, says Tao, with the Rat Pack and The Beach Boys, but its water has been rendered toxic by agricultural run-off; millions of fish die in its shallow waters - it stinks. Bombay Beach has a population of about 295, among them a man who's '99 years old and ran away from his old folks' home four years ago', stealing a car at dead of night to drive to Bombay Beach and hook up with a girlfriend from 70 years ago - he's still on the run. And another nonagenarian resident told Tao: 'I'm sure Bombay Beach will come up one day, but at my age I don't even buy green bananas.'

At the Biennale, burnt-out cars adorned the drive-in movie theatre Tao and his associates created (they screened Fellini's 8½); an oiled and Speedo-wearing barman tended the Beach Club; half-wrecked houses acted as galleries for cutting-edge work; 200 pink wooden flamingos lined the shore; there was opera; and various luminaries lectured on the 'aesthetics of decay', the celebrated writer Geoff Dyer among them - he lauded 'the wonderful mix of the serious and the silly, the desolate and the beautiful'. The challenge, says Tao, is to 'keep it weird' and not spoil what makes Bombay Beach so alluring. 'If it were any less horrible, it would suck,' noted Ashkenazy, 'it'd be horrible.' But for now he, Tao and Biennale co-creator Lily Johnson White couldn't be happier. There'll be another Biennale (the name's a joke at the art world's expense) next April. Be there or be square.

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Lily and her husband also appear in Monogamish, the documentary about marriage, open marriage and polyamory - sexual relationships in which people can have more than one partner with the full knowledge and agreement of the other partner(s) - that's taken up a good part of Tao's past four years as a director. (There are, he points out, often gaps in a filmmaker's schedule; on being told that Tao was spending all of August in Vignanello, his friend Oliver Stone said, 'Tao, your schedule indicates to me what a bum you are.') The documentary was kickstarted by Tao's divorce from Olivia Wilde in 2011 - she'd been 18 and he 26 when they married. He has, he says, 'nothing but good feelings towards her and nothing but gratitude for the time we spent together'. It was 'amazing to see her propelled into stardom and a fascinating front-row seat at something not many people get to witness'.

Nonetheless, Monogamish starts with a distraught Tao seeking counsel about his divorce and ends with him and a compliant husband bookending the husband's wife, who places a hand on each of their thighs. That relationship is over, but all three remain close. Meanwhile, Tao talks about his 'girlfriends', among them the actress Christa Allen; various other girls were dropping in on him in Italy over the summer, he told me, though their exact status in Tao's life wasn't clear to me. 'We're living in exciting times,' he says. 'I think we're living in a new sexual revolution that's more nuanced than the Sixties.' Certainly, the film suggests that friendship is perhaps the highest form of human relationship and that society is wrong to prioritise monogamous sexual relationships. 'There's such a fear of polyamory in our culture that the moment a relationship ends, people jump on it and say, "You see? It doesn't work." But when a monogamous relationship ends, nobody says, "That proves marriage doesn't work, or monogamy doesn't work.'"

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His cousin Claudia is in the movie too, and she has her own, robust view of marriage. 'I never got married because I didn't want to compromise,' she says over an enormous lunch under chestnut trees by the shimmering Lago di Vico, half an hour from Vignanello. 'Why do you think I'd change now?' The 69-year-old is talking about her stubborn vision for Castello Ruspoli, and it's Tao she's addressing: it was to her and her sister that Tao's uncle (who's 89) handed over responsibility for the place. Claudia is in favour of one vision from one person; Tao is for a more consensual approach, as is his 22-year-old half-sister, Mélusine, who's also making her way through the unending menu.

The future of the Castello is worth debating. It's a wonderful place that Pope Clement VII gave to his niece, Ortensia Farnese, as a wedding present when she married into the Ruspoli family in 1531 - his slippers are still on display there. (She was quite something, this niece: she murdered her husband in a fireplace in one of the Castello's grand rooms and had his coat of arms erased from the fire's surrounds; she killed her next two husbands too.)

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For all his 'hippie-anarcho-communistic side', Tao is clearly enthralled by the castle. And why not? There are, he shows me, a moat, an iron gate that opens onto a barrel-vaulted hall through which horses could prance, painted ceilings, faded silk wallpaper and multiple photographs of Tao's great-grandfather in eyepatch, ruff, sash and breeches, accompanying the then Queen of Italy from one ecclesiastical ceremony to another. (Not Dado's scene, one can be sure. Nor Tao's: 'I didn't have a religious upbringing, thank God,' he jokes.) Vast copper tureens hang in the kitchen; halberds decorate the halls; a chapel houses Santa Giacinta's habit ('she also used to wear a belt of nails'); below are dungeons and 'the rope room', the scene of tortures you'd not like to experience. From one window you can see the Etruscan hills, smothered in beech-wood; from another the garden.

And what a garden! It is, Tao tells me, 'the first Renaissance box-hedge garden' and 'very important - it set the fashion for centuries'. Commissioned by another grand Ruspoli wife, Ottavia Orsini, in the late 16th century, it's an exercise in formality. In its centre is a fountain whose magnificence Dado subverted by teaching Tao to swim in it. ('He'd tie a rope round my waist and guide me round.' He'd also let Tao and his brother run naked around the hedges; when Tao's great-grandmother came to visit, she'd throw her hands up in horror.)

The Castello is - sporadically - open to visitors. But, sighs Claudia, 'I'm pigra - lazy. I could open more often. I should open every day. But I don't want to be invaded.' You should, urges Tao, picking at one of the three pastas that have been served by the lake: 'I see it as the preservation of an endangered species,' he jokes. And one way to save that species might be to do what Bomarzo has done and become a fully fledged attraction.

Bomarzo? It's the wild, almost psychedelic creation of Ottavia Orsini's father, back in the 1500s, and Tao adores it ('he's a relative I'm proud to descend from'). So off go Tao, Mélusine and I in Tao's rented Panda, which is a little less electrifying than the vintage XJS Jaguar coupé he drives in Los Angeles, and definitely less extraordinary than the Vixen 21 he owns, 'which is this very rare motorhome I travel around in - they only made 500 of them and I have, like, number 151.' (Tao's got a thing about motorhomes and a Freudian explanation to go with it: 'Essentially, they're phallic on the outside and womb-like within, a mobile exemplar of our conflicting desires for the erotically adventurous and the domestically safe.') There's recherché Stones playing, and SoKo, with whom Tao made an out-there video, and Tao's talking a mile a minute, telling jokes about the Prince of Wales, agonising about Trump and remembering the time he and a distinguished Berkeley professor of his broke into a great Greek ruin south of Naples at dawn.

Tao Ruspoli

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Tao's dead right about Bomarzo: vaut le détour, in a big way. It's a Garden of Marvels, in a sacred wood, a place designed to be entered through a tiny, tilted house whose not-particularly-sloping floors are so designed as to leave the visitor completely discombobulated and weirded out - all the better to gaze on the colossal dragons, elephants and, yes, melusines (half woman, half serpent or fish) that rear up throughout the park. Or to enter the ogre's mouth, open in a violent, petrifying scream, that was a favourite of Salvador Dalí's and, indeed, of André Pieyre de Mandiargues, the man who wrote the original novel of The Girl on a Motorcycle, the book Tao's hoping to bring to the silver screen. 'Isn't it fantastic?' he says, shooting away with his Sony. And perhaps, he muses, it was Dado who first introduced Dalí to Bomarzo - until 60 years ago an unkempt woodland through which sheep roamed, wandering in and out of that ogre's mouth.

I love it, and Mélusine loves it and you can see why Tao really, really likes it. It's utterly original, hallucinatory and meant to astonish, a monument not to formality but to the wilder shores of fantasy - just the sort of thing you might find by the shores of the Salton Sea, in Tao's other Californian world, the sort of place where, he says, 'you can just play and have a sense of infinite possibility - I love that.'

Quite so: as Geoff Dyer said of the Bombay Beach Biennale, 'people will be boasting about having been here in the beginning, in the way they talk now about the first Baker Beach burns [the events that gave birth to Burning Man]. I know I will.' And who'll have lit that flame? Tao Ruspoli, prince among men.